Informal portrait of Errol John Emanuel, assistant commissioner of the Gazelle Peninsula in Papua ...

Informal portrait of Errol John Emanuel, assistant commissioner of the Gazelle Peninsula in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Born at Enfield, Sydney, NSW, in 1918 he joined the PNG Administration in August 1946 as a patrol officer. Between 1956 and 1965 he was at Gazelle Peninsula. He became a specialist on the Tolai and fluent in their language and in 1969 he began his role as mediator. Over the course of the next two years, Emanuel worked tirelessly to restore both peace and sanity to an increasingly violent situation. In 1971 he was appointed district commissioner and on the 19 August 1971, he had gone with a police party to Kabaira Plantation, near Rabaul to mediate in another crisis. Emanuel left his police escort when he arrived at the plantation, met one of the Tolai and was stabbed with a wartime Japanese bayonet. A measure of Emanuel's reputation and personality, and of the public shock at his murder, was the attendance crowd of 10,000 people at his funeral at Rabaul. He was awarded the George Cross posthumously on 27 February 1972.